Business cards...go offset...its the best way

Not always, there are some good digital printers too.

How much ya lookin to spend? You could get a digital press...

I am interested to hear what ppl have to say about this. Could be something for us to invest in very soon.

aye, the only digital press I've seen was huge, and expensive...took up a good portion of the room too

It would be sweet to print in-house. I've got a fancy printer (not THAT fancy, but there are some things I could probably print for clients), but the thing never freaking works and I don't exactly have the technical expertise to fix office equipment. That would probably be my biggest concern.

Then the knife.... the bindery, the packaging.......
PASS...thanks

Check this thing out Big Drunk.
http://www.xante.com/products/Ilumina/

yah I with the offset crowd...just cant justify such a large investment right now.

If you are thinking digital printers do not forget the 'ongoing' toner costs.
The better machines need 'paying' customers to maintain rather than inhouse newsletters and small runs.
If you need to print less than 100 cards each ok but unlike offest printing the 'price each' does not decrease the more you print ..it multiplies.
Also consider the professional image your business needs to portray.

Brackets is right about the toner costs, but off about portraying a "professional image".
Toner for these machines is kinda expensive, for the press we just got it's just under $800 for a set of 4 cartridges. What it really comes down to is toner coverage. Supposedly with a 5% coverage you can print 15,000 pages - about 5 cents a page. We all know this is not real life. From our rough calculations so far (running a lot of 100% coverage or greater if we run oversized paper) we are in the neighborhood of 21 cents per page or about 9 bucks for a box of 500 business cards + paper cost.

As for a professional image - digital presses have really improved over the last couple years. 1200 dpi and they can print on really heavy stock. I was skeptical at first but put a printed piece side by side with offset and I doubt you would be able to tell which one was digital. I you really wanted to offset some of the toner costs just get a real estate agency customer - they are suckers for 4 color cards with their goofy looking pictures on em

Don't forget if you are printing inhouse you will also have to invest in some decent trimming equipment - especially for things as small as business cards - and good ones aren't cheap. If you are prepared to go with something manual it works out cheaper, but they are limited in the number of pieces they can cut simultaneously.

Cool! Thanks for all your advice on this, looks like Im better outsourcing the printing for now. Shame as I fancied doing it myself, but it looks bloody expensive!!

After some more printing and investigation it turns out that they shipped us with smaller toner cartridges than the ones you usually buy. We got approximately 3600 pages from the half full toner cartridges that came with the machine. Multiply that by 2 and you come to aprox. 7400 pages or about a toner cost of .09 - .10 cents per page - $3.75 per box of 500 business cards.